


To See a World in a Grain of Sand

by Edonohana



Category: The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Michael Swanwick
Genre: Gen, Meryons, Recreational Drug Use, University, terrible roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-25 09:06:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21353716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/pseuds/Edonohana
Summary: Jane was the first to notice that a ragtag band of refugee meryons had made a camp behind a sofa in the student lounge.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 18
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	To See a World in a Grain of Sand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Northland](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Northland/gifts).

Jane was the first to notice that a ragtag band of refugee meryons had made a camp behind a sofa in the student lounge. 

It had been raining for weeks, which was long enough to overwhelm their scrap metal seawalls and flood their tunnels. When Jane hurried through the streets under an umbrella, she’d see them desperately manning sump pumps powered by the batteries of lost watches or evacuating on cigarette pack pontoon boats or swept away by the tidal wave of her foot in a puddle. 

She wasn’t sure what to do about them, if anything. Fishing any one meryon out and depositing it on dry ground seemed futile and arbitrary when so many millions of them were dying, but leaving them to drown made her imagine that some being that was as vast to her as Jane was to the meryons could have rescued her and chose not to, because she was too small and there were too many like her and she didn’t seem worth the bother. 

Also, the meryons reminded her of Melanchthon, which made her want to hurry by rather than stopping to help them. Did that mean her own theoretical vast being—the Goddess, say—would pass her by because of Jane’s own association with the iron dragon?

The devastated meryons were an unsettling sight, and one which evoked unsettling trains of thought. But it could all easily be avoided by simply staying inside. Jane had lots of studying to do anyway. But she didn’t like spending all her studying time in her dorm room. Her roommate Monkey had recently taken up with a dullahan who carried his head underneath his arm, which meant he could position it anywhere he liked. Monkey took full advantage of this, and Jane found it impossible to study when her roommate was having a noisy orgasm less than a foot away. 

So she took refuge in the student lounge. The roof leaked and the exposed pipes in the ceiling meant that you always had to look up before you stepped in, lest you bang your head against the head of a student roosting upside down. (The bars in the dorm closets weren’t strong enough to accommodate the weight of a person, even one with hollow bones.) But the advantage of this meant that it was often unoccupied, or else the only others present were hibernating, and so there was a chance that it would be quiet. Or at least quieter than her room.

The day she discovered the meryons, Jane was lucky enough to claim the second-least stained of the sofas. (The one that was unstained had a curse on it). She leaned back and opened _Practical Gramarye._ While she studied, a swanmay came in and sketched alchemical sigils on the wall in glowing mold, a group of red dwarves came in stoned and giggling and tried to order a pizza by sticking their heads out the windows and shouting, and a trow and a glaistig came in and mostly studied, though they also spent some time making out. 

Eventually Monkey and her dullahan wandered in, flushed and disheveled. Monkey took a drink from the bucket set out to collect water from the leak. The dullahan cracked his whip, a human spine set into a polished bone handle, and she leaped away with a coy squeal. Jane pretended to be too engrossed in her studies to notice they were there, even when Monkey got in her face and demanded beer money, and was relieved when they took off. 

Jane closed the book. Once again, she was alone in the lounge. Her eyes felt gritty and her head was stuffed to bursting with incantations. She was tired, too tired to leave the lounge or even the sofa, and wished she’d brought another book or some beer with her. She rolled over, and that was when she saw the meryons behind the sofa.

A line of tiny figures was marching through a crack in the wall. Some carried burdens on their backs, but most were empty-handed. They were drenched; she could tell because they left flyspeck pools of water where they stood. 

Jane’s childhood fascination with meryons and their reduced-scale world came back to her. She didn’t think of Melanchthon or the meryons who were presumably still slaving for him in her stead, but simply observed these meryons now, tiny figures in a vast universe. 

The University employed a team of sullen, overworked brownies to clean the dormitories, but they tended to merely sweep up whatever crumbs and dead mice and candy wrappers were in plain sight, and leave the rest. Trash had accumulated behind and beneath the sofa, some of it in geographic strata. Jane watched, absorbed, as the meryons set to work.

The meryons divided into neat formations and set about sorting through the trash. Spoiled food was carried away and piled up in an impromptu compost heap, while edible food was set out in a neat array in its own area, where another formation of meryons went to work sorting it into categories: popcorn kernels, candy, dry noodles, seasoned moths, and so forth. Jane was impressed to see that they even differentiated between snacks that were imperishable because of chemical treatment, and snacks that were imperishable because of spells: Twinkie crumbs were stacked beside Frito fragments, while Cauld Lad ice cream dots went with Thrummy-cap seawater bits.

With amazing speed, refugee tents of plastic wrappers with popsicle stick poles were erected, and lost foundation sponges were sliced up into minuscule futons. An instant noodle cup was placed to collect water from a slow roof leak behind the sofa, and straws piped it out for distribution. 

When Jane finally, reluctantly left, the meryons had fashioned staples and toothpicks into spears, and were busy hunting the wild roaches. 

Back in her dorm room, Monkey and her boyfriend were still gone, but Jane found footprints on her own pillow and damp stains on her blanket. They had obviously had sex on Jane's bed just to spite her. Jane switched their blankets, though Monkey’s was also stained and Jane had to shake out a bunch of dead leaves, also just to spite her.

In between classes and avoiding her roommate, Jane continued to watch the meryons. As they made further progress in excavating the trash, the refugee tents were dismantled and apartments were built of cardboard lumber. Jane was enchanted to see them use plastic pizza dividers as round tables, repurpose coffee creamer containers as water barrels, and pull apart an unused tampon and use the wealth of expanding cotton to stuff pillows and mattresses covered in cloth cut from a pair of lost panties. 

As their orderly society began to function on a non-emergency basis, they took up another normal meryon behavior. Jane watched with alarm as small parties were sent out on foraging expeditions, sometimes returning in triumph bent-backed under the weight of an entire energy bar, sometimes straggling in limping and empty-handed, and sometimes not returning at all. But they had to do it. The scraps of edible trash under the sofa were nowhere near enough to feed them. 

But if they continued invading the dorm rooms, sooner or later an annoyed student who wasn’t cultivating magic mushrooms in their closet or attempting to grow a homunculus in a jar under their bed would be willing to complain and risk a room inspection. And then the meryons would be traced back to the sofa and exterminated.

It preyed on Jane’s mind. When she ought to have been paying close attention to the class dissection of a fetal wyvern, she instead found herself debating whether she should feed them herself. But if she provided them with sufficient food to stop their foraging, then they’d start reproducing, and she’d have more meryons that needed more food. It was an unsustainable system, in addition to not being her problem.

When she returned to the student lounge, she was alarmed to see a group of students clustered on and around and atop _her_ sofa. The meryons’ sofa.

Jane forced herself to approach, knowing that if they were killing the meryons or setting fire to their cardboard apartments, there was nothing she could do about it. They _were_ vermin. 

“Go on, little guys,” urged a black dwarf. “It’s all yours!”

“They’re so… little,” murmured Tin, a perpetually stoned nixie. Water beaded up slowly on the spikes of her short haircut and dripped down her face. “Just look how little they are.”

Jane pushed forward. She was relieved, then annoyed at her relief, to see that the meryons were unharmed. The students weren’t murdering them, they were feeding them. A pitcher of beer and three large pizzas (margherita, all-meat, and whole mouse) were on the table, and the students were tearing up pieces and prying off toppings to feed the meryons.

“Just look at them butcher that mouse,” said the dullahan. He was holding his head out by the hair to watch.

“Don’t give them an entire mouse,” Monkey said, annoyed. “If you don’t want the mouse, give it to me.”

“It’s no fun watching _you_ eat a mouse,” he retorted. “You just swallow it whole.” 

“Fuck you, then,” snapped Monkey, and stormed out.

“Why do you think it is that we’re so big, and they’re so small?” Tin asked dreamily. “Do you think maybe there’s someone who’s as big to us as we are to them?”

Jane gave her a quick glance to make sure she was just high and not taken by _awen_.

“And maybe there’s someone who’s as big to the person who’s big to us as that person’s big to us,” Tin went on. “And maybe there’s someone who’s as big to _that_ person. And someone who’s as big to _that_ person….”

Jane ducked the spray of water as Tin waved her hands to indicate infinite vastness. _Just high_, she decided. She stole a glass of beer and two slices of the margherita, and vanished with them before anyone noticed that she hadn’t been invited to the party. 

When she returned to the student lounge the next day, she found that the meryons had made good use of their bounty. They’d fashioned a smoker from sawed pencil-logs and had mouse hams and loins and bacon hanging neatly from a shoelace line. The cheese was stored away, the crusts were cut into loaves and drying for hardtack, and the rest had been eaten. 

She also noticed that someone had set an entire glass of beer behind the sofa. Jane had no idea whether they’d done it accidentally or on purpose, but the meryons were taking full advantage of it. They’d covered it tightly with plastic wrap and welded it shut so it wouldn’t spoil, then created a new system of straw pipes so they could tap it at will. 

_Lucky meryons,_ Jane thought, amused. Meat and bread and cheese and beer: what more could they want?

As she watched the meryons grinding mouse jerky and popcorn kernels into pemmican, she was joined by a pair of the red dwarves from the party of the night before. Jane, who didn’t care for others knowing about her hidden world even if they had accidentally solved her dilemma over it, hoped they’d take a quick peek and go. But they stayed, kneeling on the floor like supplicants at a minuscule altar. 

This attracted the attention of the next students to enter the lounge, a skinny pixie Jane didn’t know and a white bucca from Alchemy 101, neither of whom had been at the party. The bucca watched for a minute, then ran out and returned with her roommate and her roommate’s girlfriend. Then Tin arrived, drifting across the floor and leaving a trail of river water. 

The dullahan appeared, holding his head in one hand and a fistful of beechnut M&Ms in the other, which he dropped, one by one, behind the sofa. The meryons first ran after them and rolled them into a potato chip sack, then began catching them before they hit the ground in a net woven of spiderweb and sofa threads. The students cheered each catch. Jane’s solitary pleasure had turned into something more like a public orgy.

“Poor things,” murmured the bucca’s roommate’s girlfriend. “Work, work, work. Don’t they ever have fun?”

“It’s their nature to work,” said Jane. 

Tin opened her hand. A pink glitter packet lay in her palm—an eighth of pixie dust, now reduced to something more like a twenty-fourth. Even that tiny amount of dust caught the eye with its shifting colors and dazzle. You couldn’t see it without wanting to snort it or pour it on to your tongue.

The nixie tilted the paper and blew gently, and pixie dust drifted down to the meryons.

The meryons’ minuscule faces turned upward as the powder drifted down. Each grain was like snowflake to them, and they stretched out their hands to catch them. And bent their tiny heads to taste. 

The meryons stopped working. 

They dropped their tools and weapons, running out of the trash mines in undisplined mobs to swarm the pixie dust. At one grain per meryon, there was more than enough for all. 

Jane watched, torn between hilarity and horror, as the meryons began to dance in their linoleum streets with the clumsy glee of beings who had never danced before. Some staggered drunkenly about, bumping into crumpled napkins, falling over, and getting up to do it again. Others stood stock-still, presumably gazing at all the pretty colors. Still yet others began openly fucking atop crinkling chocolate wrappers and in the hollows of plastic spoons, a task which meryons normally only undertook in the darkest and deepest of their tunnels. 

The students laughed and cheered, almost as revved up as the meryons. Monkey came in, attracted by the noise, but spotted the dullahan with his head resting on Tin's shoulder and retreated with a snarl. 

With their accelerated metabolisms, the meryons quickly reached the munchie stage. They opened the spigots on the beer glass and let it pour out in a river across the floor, with lines of meryons lying down and lapping at it. The hanging lines of mouse sausages were ripped down and devoured, and the M&Ms hacked open and messily eaten. 

Jane, wedged into the crowd, felt abruptly claustrophobic. She extracted herself from the sofa and went back to her room. Monkey was lying on her own bed, staring at the ceiling. Her long arms were flung out, her prehensile fingers open and slack. 

“Hey,” Jane said uncertainly. “Are you okay?”

“Just fuck off and leave me alone,” Monkey said. She threw herself off the bed and crawled under it, wedging herself into the six-inch clearance with the startling agility of her kind.

Jane figured she might as well take advantage of the peace and quiet to study, since there sure wasn’t much of that in the student lounge right now. She managed to finish her homework, but it took longer than she’d expected; she kept getting distracted by the faint whoops from the student lounge, and by Monkey’s muffled sobs. 

Over the next week, the student lounge transformed from a refuge for the studious and unpopular to the University’s hot spot. Students gathered to watch the meryons, which they supplied with pizza, sparrow chips, peanut butter cups, sea sweets, mushrooms (magic and otherwise), pixie dust, weed, coke, and beer. The meryons spent much of their time in public orgies and drunken brawls. They no longer hunted or excavated or built or stored, but used what they had and then begged the students for more, waving little flags of cut-up plastic whenever their drugs or food ran low. 

Jane no longer studied in the lounge. It was too crowded and noisy. Monkey moved out from under the bed, but only to take up residence in the closet, where she continued to cry noisily, rebuffing Jane’s attempts to talk to her with shrieks of “Fuck off, you cunting caterpillar!” 

Sometimes stoned meryons would wander inside her room and make blatant, clumsy grabs at anything not nailed down. She saw them wandering the halls in broad daylight, staggering about with hysterical laughter at too high a pitch for her to hear. 

The outcome was inevitable. It came in the form of a sign, a standard printed one in bold colors taped to the student lounge door.

MERYON INFESTATION  
GASSING TOMORROW  
NO ENTRY  
DO NOT EAT TRASH 

Jane imagined a tent being dropped over the University, and gas piped in to clear out the infestation. It would roll through the halls and seep under the dorm room doors, killing Jane and Monkey and Tin and the dullahan and the professors and even the homunculi in their jars. Unless someone as vast to them as they were to the meryons stepped in.

Jane dropped by Tin’s room to borrow a book, and swiftly tipped some of her pixie dust into a makeup compact when the nixie turned to look for it. Tin eventually discovered the book beneath a pile of old leggings in her closet, damp and sprouting mushrooms. That gave Jane enough time to drop a scrap of meryon-woven netting by the dust, so if Tin noticed that her store had diminished she’d think the meryons took it. 

Jane obtained a meryon live trap via lab theft. She baited it with the pixie dust, watched their undignified scramble for it, and waited till the last one was through before closing the door. The meryons didn’t even notice; they were too busy having an orgy. 

She dropped an old coat over the trap, so no one would see what she carried, and caught a behemoth to Quill-on-the-Green, which was as close as the snorting, farting iron beast could get to the Old Wood. Quill-on-the-Green had fallen on hard times since it had foraged its one valuable product, fairy butter, into extinction. Now half the shops were closed down, some not even guarded with hexes, and the streets were lined with wretched beggars who had once been fat and prosperous buttery spirits. 

Jane hurried through the decaying village and cautiously approached the outskirts of the Old Woods. The demarcation was easy to observe, as the golden folds of fairy butter clung to half the trees in the Old Woods, while there was none outside.

“I beg your leave to enter,” Jane said, stopping well before the dividing line. “I will take nothing except the air I breathe, and that I will return before I go. I come only to bring you a gift of this meryon colony.”

She removed the coat and held up the trap. The meryons huddled in a sullen, hungover mass at the bottom. They didn’t look like much of a gift. _Take it or leave it,_ she thought. If the answer was no, she could always just take them back to the city or release them in Quill-on-the-Green.

A pine cone fell from a tree, striking a stone with a sharp rap. Jane stepped into the wood.

She walked until she found a pleasant glen, parts sunny and lined with wildflowers, parts shaded and soft with moss. There were raspberry canes growing along one side, and acorns littered the ground. Off to one side was a rippling stream. 

Jane set down the meryon trap and opened the door. The meryons straggled out, disconsolate and wobbly. Some fell over on the moss, and some sat down in a distinctly sullen manner. But others lined up and began to march about, exploring their new territory. Jane waited until the first few parties of builders began digging and the first foraging party returned with acorns to shell and soak, and then she left. It seemed like they’d gotten off to a decent start.

Making sure to exhale completely first, Jane stepped out of the Old Woods. One at a time, she took off her shoes, held them over the line, and shook off the dirt. Then she went back through Quill-in-the-Green and caught the last behemoth back to the city.

It was late when she returned, but she hoped she could get in a bit of quick study before bed. She had a test the next day and she couldn’t use the student lounge, but at least Monkey wouldn't be having sex in her room.

Jane opened the door on Monkey, stark naked, grinning, and wriggling, sprawled out with Hedley Kow crouched atop her and licking a trail of fairy butter off her body. The bogie’s cow tail lashed excitedly as he reached her inner thighs.

Monkey turned to glance at Jane. She reached out and picked up the butter pot from the dresser. “Want some? I’ve got lots.”

“Thanks. Maybe later,” Jane said politely. Monkey was on her own bed, and Jane wanted to encourage that. 

She took her book and sat down in the corridor outside her room. It could be worse. Soon the student lounge would be hers again, and she’d no longer have to listen to Monkey’s noisy weeping under the bed as she was trying to sleep.

She wondered what the meryons were doing now. Were they asleep on beds of moss? Had they captured fireflies to use as lanterns as they worked through the night?

Once they’d built enough tools, they’d harvest grass seeds and acorns and mushrooms, net minnows, and hunt voles. They’d dig vast underground labyrinths, and build stables of twigs caulked with clay to house their riding mice. Cherry pits would be hollowed into cups, rabbit hairs used as sewing thread, and dandelion fluff would soften their leafy beds. Meryons used to live like that, without ever using large folks’ trash. When it rained, they abandoned their tunnels and swarmed up trees until the ground dried out.

Would they be content with hunting and gathering, or would they miss the student lounge and learn to cultivate opium from poppies? Would they wander out of the woods to forage in Quill-on-the-Green, until someone got annoyed and called the exterminators?

Jane had plucked them up from their lives and set them down somewhere else. She hoped that if she could have asked them what they wanted, it was what they would have chosen; she hoped they would see their new home as a haven rather than an exile. At the very least, she hoped they’d survive the cold winter to come. 

But she never returned to the forest to check. She had given them that new start; what they did with it was up to them.


End file.
